Orbital Decay Read Free

it, even hearing what they had to say would be impossible. If my suit radio, or the radio in my poor wrecked tractor was still working, I wouldn’t be sitting here now, waiting to die.
    Life is just full of little ironies, ain’t it?
    I wonder which will go out first: the oxygen supply, the batteries in my life-support system, which keep me from freezing to death, or the microcassette into which I’m dictating these last thoughts. Theoretically I shouldn’t be wasting precious air in speaking; I should be conserving it in hopes that a search party from Descartes Station will find me in time. Rescued in the nick of time, la la la. Sorry, that stuff only happens in science fiction stories. I know damn well that the guys back at the base, inert bastards that they are, won’t even think about looking for me until I’m several hours overdue. These two-week days tend to distort time like that. I’ll be long dead by the time someone peers over his Marvel comic book and says, “Hey, what happened to Sam?” It’ll be another hour before someone else says, “Hey, y’know, I think Sam’s overdue from his trip out.” And it’ll be another hour after that before someone finally says, “Well, gee whiz, maybe we ought to take another track out and go find ol’ Sam; he might be in trouble or something.”
    You sons of bitches. I’m gonna get you for this.
    At least there’s the consolation, the posthumous booby prize, that someone may eventually transcribe these taped recollections and publish them as an article about the man who made the greatest discovery. After all these years, after all those reject slips, I’ll finally get something of mine in print. The last words of a failed science fiction writer; maybe it’ll even get in Analog or Omni , one of the mags that turned down all the other stuff I wrote. It may even spur some publisher to print Ragnarok Night , the SF novel that no one would touch while I was alive.
    I can always daydream, can’t I?
    Yeah, life is just full of them crazy little ironies. Death is too, I suppose.
    So, to pass the time until my oxygen or suit batteries peter out, I’ll tell you a story, you who will someday separate this tape from my suit recorder. A spaceman’s memoirs, if you will. How Samuel K. Sloane, who got a job with Skycorp so he could go to space to get authentic background for his science fiction novel, ended up making the Great Discovery.
    Of course, that isn’t all there is to it. There was also the stuff that happened on Skycan and Vulcan, like Doc Felapolous and his cats or the run-in between Virgin Bruce and Cap’n Wallace, and Jack Hamilton and orbital decadence, and the day we messed with the plans of the National Security Agency and stuck a banana in the Big Ear, so to speak. That all came first… which of course means that I had best start at the beginning, like you do with all good stories.
    First, you have to understand that outer space isn’t all that it’s cut out to be….

1
Homesick
    T HE DAYS BEGAN THE same way after a while: adventure made mediocre through repetition, the vastness of space a stale background against which their tedious lives were played.
    A dozen men floated in the narrow cylindrical compartment, all facing in the same direction like automatons waiting to be activated. Even in weightlessness their aluminum space armor and enormous MMU backpacks seemed to hang on them like heavy burdens; they slouched under their packs, their shoulders bent, their helmeted heads hanging low, their hands moving slowly as they replenished their oxygen tanks from hoses dangling from the wall. The compartment was filled with the sound of hissing air and the thin crackle of suit radios being tested, of muttered comments and complaints and the clink of tools nestling together in the cargo pockets of their overgarments. Behind them a technician, wearing a T-shirt with a rock band’s name stenciled on the front, floated from man to man, checking suit joint